Rizal in July

School's in again, and teachers, not just media folk, get invited to activities related to their profession and vocation, particularly the teaching of the life and works of our national hero (my personal idol) Jose Rizal.

When Maite dela Rosa, my supervisor (the equivalent of a principal) at the Community of Learners, learned that I was up and about after an ailment and going out already, sometimes to attend lectures (one event a day, unlike before when I had a crowded tuhog-tuhog or one appointment after the other schedule), she asked that I go to this one: the Teachers' Conference on Rizal's Life and Works at PETA's home grounds on Eymard Drive, New Manila, Quezon City. Whenever I go there and the weather outside ain't rainy, I start to miss its former home, an open-air theater at Fort Santiago, Intramuros, those years when PETA truly embodied the "aesthetics of poverty." There's something about walls and ceilings.

My daughter and niece like to remind me I should keep my storytelling down to 350 words or less and let the rest of the story be told in photos.

So okay, okay, I know how to listen to these experts in social media communication--the young.

This is the lamp burner that Rizal gave to his sister Trinidad and where he put his poem "Mi Ultimo Adios." This lamp is in the permanent collection of the Ateneo Library and housed in its Art Gallery on the second floor. I took this photo during a class field trip to the university's Library of Women's Writings and gallery on another occasion. Photos by Babeth Lolarga

When you're at a PETA workshop, prepare to get physical before you buckle down to listen to a lecture, watch a play's excerpt or have a Q and A with the playwright or director.

A tour of the theater all ready for another weekend of Rak of Aegis

View from the outside of a dressing and make-up room

To the question on why he chose to specialize in teaching the Rizal course, Vic Torres, a De La Salle University professor and five-time Palanca Literary Award winner, said in the beginning (or just five years ago), he took it for granted. It meant an additional subject, additional pay apart from teaching journalism and history. Then he realized while studying and preparing his lectures that there was so much to learn from the national hero's life and even to discover new things about that life. His novel Noli Me Tangere, for example, is also "a literal recipe book--it was obvious that he was hungry when he was abroad." Before Dr. Torres knew it, Rizal became very much a part of his life.

Just a stray?

Stray cat being admired by a homeowner who may be allergic to it. Photo by Junic Lolarga

how can you be stray

when you've walked this old planet

ahead of this girl?

- Babeth Lolarga
July 19, 2015

Deerest

Deer that wandered onto my brother's garden in Calgary, Canada, on a June morning and had flowers for brekkie Photo by Junic Lolarga



return for seconds

the pansies won't mind at all

lining your belly

- Babeth Lolarga
July 17, 2015

Haiku Thursday

Calgary landscape Photo by Junic Lolarga




and even as we

move, we keep the stillness in

us this windless day

- Babeth Lolarga
July 16, 2016

Guess who's always in the moment?

The ailing teacher Thich Nhat Hanh (get well soon, please) wrote once, "Life can only be found in the present moment."

This morning my youngest sibling felt unwell. It turned out that her BP was at an all-time high of 170/100. I couldn't resist having my own blood pressure monitored since the automatic reader was out already. Mine read 130/80. Pang-dalaga! Throughout all this, curious curly-haired Kai observed with eyes growing wider.

To make her not worry while we fussed over our signs of mortality, sis and I alternated in asking her, "What do you want to be when you grow up?"

Booboo: "Do you wanna be a doctor?"

Kai: "No."

Mamita Gigi: "A nurse?"

Kai: "No."

Booboo: "A teacher like Granny Su?"

Kai: "No."

Mamita Gigi: "But you have to be doing something when you're grown up."

Booboo: "How about street sweeper? You go places."

Kai: "No."

Finally, Mamita Gigi and I said, almost as one, "So what do you wanna be?"

Kai: "A person!"

Booboo: "What are you gonna do as a person?"

Kai: "I'll play with blocks."

She smiled at us and walked away.

Mamita and Booboo looked at each other wordlessly. But our look must have read, "She got us there. And once again she's right."

Selfie shoe-fie by Kai Fernandez

Coloring is for all

This “Peter Pan market” has roots in publishing, beyond coloring books (the growth in sales of children’s and young-adult books to much older readers has been well documented), but it is far from confined to that arena.

Summer camps for adults, for example, have also gone from curiosity to viable enterprise. Following a near-death experience, Fidget Wigglesworth (birth name: Levi Felix), then the vice-president of a successful dot-com, turned off his phone and went backpacking for two and a half years with his partner, Brooke Dean; when they returned, in 2012, they founded Camp Grounded, a “Digital Detox” experience for which campers relinquish their electronic devices and engage instead in stargazing and sing-alongs...
...
“Coloring is so accessible,” she told me. “It unleashes the creativity we all have in a way that’s quite safe.” - Adrienne Raphel, "Why Adults Are Buying Coloring Books (for Themselves)" found in today's www.newyorker.com

Kimi's "book" and her tentative strokes

By coincidence, my eldest child Kimi (no longer a child, really, she's 30) Kimi came home a few hours ago from National Bookstore with something that would "chillax" her from her online work: a coloring book. Her fear is she might get addicted to coloring books and not get any official work finished. Nah, Kimi has a Kai to support so she has to balance work and play.

Curly Kai wasn't going to be outdone. I pulled out a "spoiled" rubbercut print that I had done when I went to art school at the University of the Philippines Baguio and a tin box full of broken or used oil pastels and pencils, still not all dried up (keep 'em sealed always). One of our electives in the Fine Arts program was printmaking (then taught by Manolo Sicat).

Like I wrote in an earlier blog, I like partnering with Kai--this time I gave the given (not a blank canvas paper as I did over a month ago) and it's her turn to fill up the places and spaces with colors.

When I left her less than 30 minutes ago, she was still at it.

God bless James Barrie's eternal boy Peter Pan and whoever invented the adult coloring book. Also grandmas who don't immediately throw old works away. My rubbercut that has lemons and strawberries for its subject now has a life of its own, and it isn't wholly mine but Kai's, too.

Our curly-haired colorist giving life to an old black and white print Photos by Babeth Lolarga

Without gutters

Ordinarily, homeowners take advantage of summer to have the months' accumulated debris and dry leaves removed, rain gutters repaired and holes sealed, all set for the monsoon. But when your unconventional homeowner/builder insists on no gutters to catch the tear-shaped drops, you know he had this in mind when tikbalang weather occurs (according to Philippine mythology, when rain falls and startlingly bright sun shines at the same time, tikbalangs are being wed)--all family members, friends, friends of friends, the passersby get to experience this. Keep the front door open, Alejandro, so we can watch till the last of the peter-patter-down-no-gutters stops. Then hear in your mind "Soon It's Gonna Rain," replayed from The Fantasticks.

On closer inspection the raindrops on sleeves of green look almost as solid as pearls when frozen in a picture. Think Dickinson: "I died for Beauty, but was scarce." Photos of a Sunday in Antipolo by Babeth Lolarga

2 kyootats slumming

"But, I’ve been writing (and blogging) long enough to know that even the worst case of blog blahs eventually passes: you just have to wait it out. And the best way of waiting, of course, is to keep writing, even if what you’re writing seems inane, insipid, and uninspired....When you’re in the midst of the blog blahs, you begin to wonder if you’re ever going to write another decent blog post, another decent journal entry, or another decent anything, but the only way out of that slump is to write your way out. -- Lorianne DiSabato writing in her blog hoardedordinaries.wordpress.com

Meanwhile, here's a pic of two sisters growing up in the '60s smilin' at ya. I cropped this from a bigger collage made by my sissy Evelyn Marie (Embeng, a nickname she herself coined, how cool is that?). She followed me 14 months after I made my own Earth landing in 1955. Six more bibis followed her. Them were "the more the many-er years" when phrases like "child spacing," "reproductive health" weren't in anyone's lexicon. Like Dad, she's inventive with words so "cute" for the new little ones in our lives was never pronounced "kyoot" but "kyootat"; "eat out" is "eatat."

I truly believe her assurance when she texted on my birthday: "It's going to be okay in time. Love you with your ups and downs." I don't know where she picked up the next quote (something our late Lola Purang must've passed on to us--this propensity for seeking inspiration or a lifeline in words well thought out but simply strung together): "Beautiful things aren't always recognizable at first glance."

Okay, stamping on this temporary slump. Brookside Baby ain't drownin yet.